Disabling Capitalised Menus in Visual Studio 2012

Visual Studio 2012 includes many design changes within the integrated development environment (IDE). One, which has been somewhat controversial, is the use of capitalised menus. For developers who find these distracting, the capitalisation can be removed.

Visual Studio 2012

Visual Studio 2012 includes an updated design for the IDE. The design makes less use of colour than the previous version and has fewer dividing lines. Microsoft has said that this places the emphasis on the information that you are working with, such as source code or designer surfaces, rather than Visual Studio itself.

One change to the design is that the text on the menu bar now appears in upper case, also known as All Caps, rather than the previously used title case. This is to match the design cues of Windows 8's Modern UI Style, formerly known as Metro. This change has been somewhat controversial, with some developers finding that the new menus are distracting, hard to scan quickly, or that they use more space than is necessary. The menus appear as shown below:

Luckily, Microsoft has included a way to disable the capitalisation of the menus so that you may view them using title case instead. This change is made in the registry. If you wish to adjust the menu casing, open the Registry Editor and find the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General

Within this registry key, check for the existence of the following value:

SuppressUppercaseConversion

If the above item is present, open it and change its value to 1. If the value does not exist, create it as a 32-bit DWORD value with a value of 1. Once you have made the change, you will need to restart Visual Studio. The menus should now appear as follows:

If you decide that you would prefer to use the capitalised menus, you can either remove the SuppressUppercaseConversion value from the registry or set its value to zero.